Apple Vs Google

During his 2010 Apple special music event numbers breakdown, Steve Jobs said that Apple is activating 230,000 iOS devices a day. He made sure to point out those were new activations and said some of their "friends" (read: Google) are counting upgrades in their numbers (200,000 Android activations a day).

Apple denying the app to those who want it, especially when it allows similar apps such as Line2 into the App Store, means it's almost certainly what we thought it was last year -- less to do with what the app does than what it represents.

TechCrunch went through the fine print and noticed that, with iOS 3.2 (iPhone 3.2 for iPad) Apple switched from using Skyhook and Google's location database to using their own, home spun, solution.

When reached for comment, Skyhook wouldn’t specifically talk about their relationship with Apple, but they did say that “everyone who has a platform wants to own as much of the location stack as possible. Location data is going the be huge and owning it is going to be the next big war in mobile.“

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a recent interview that they're not in competition with Apple, even while taking a little shot at the company on whose board of directors he sat during the iPhone's development.

We don't have a plan to beat Apple, that's not how we operate," Schmidt says. "We're trying to do something different than Apple and the good news is that Apple is making that very easy."

"The difference between the Apple model and the Google model is easy to understand - they're completely different. The Google model is completely open. You can basically take the software - it's free - you can modify whatever you want, you can add any kind of app, you can build any kind of business model on top of it and you can add any kind of hardware. The Apple model is the inverse."

Which is poppycock, really.

I'm as invested in Google's services as I am Apple's products, but come on. Completely open? Like any company, Google is open in what doesn't make them money and proprietary as heck in what does. Android is open (under the Apache license, not GPL -- which should give the philosophical FOSSies pause) but Google certainly hasn't opened their search or AdWords platforms. Likewise Apple open sources WebKit (which Google uses for their browser) and OpenCL and Grand Central and FaceTime, but keeps their crown jewels equally closed. So enough already with the open stuff. You give me free services so you can mine my data, I sell my soul to you to use them. Deal. Just don't insult my intelligence while doing it.

It should come as no surprise that both Palm webOS and Google Android want iPhone developers on their platform. Mac developers have long been as passionate about their platform and incredibly talented in the apps they've delivered, and a lot of that has transferred over to iOS devices like the iPhone and now iPad.

Whether or not Apple is engaged in a platform war with Palm and Google it's inarguable that the current generation of users want apps and right now Apple has an advantage in that area. Part of getting people to switch to another platform is making sure the apps they love are on that platform, and that means big name apps and fan favorites alike.

Apple restricting third-party advertisers from collecting personal data if they are owned by another platform vendor could be a way of preventing Google's AdMob from competing directly on the iPhone with Apple's iAd, but it could also be a sign that Apple, cranky after leaked iPhone prototypes and iPad analytics, is determined to take back control of user data.

The US government is reportedly now investigating Apple for the terms in the iOS 4 GM license that restrict rival ad networks owned by competing platforms -- i.e. Google's AdMob. Independent ad networks are not effected, nor is Apple's own iAd platform.

According to two people close to the situation, US regulators have already taken an interest in Apple’s actions, though it is not yet clear whether it will be left to the Federal Trade Commission, which carried out the recent Google investigation, or the Department of Justice to take an investigation forward.